Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 38: Sat Feb 8

Toute Une Nuit (Akerman, 1982): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI and will also be shown on February 19th. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
Chantal Akerman, the mistress of minimalism, has made her own midsummer night's sex comedy, with a superabundance of stories and a cast of (almost) thousands. The film shows an endless series of brief encounters that take place in Brussels in the course of one delirious, torrid June night, with the twist that each relationship is condensed into a single moment of high melodrama - the coup de foudre, the climax of passion, the end of an affair - with the spectator left to fill in the fictional spaces between scenes. Each couple compulsively plays through the same gestures, each mating rite is a variation on the same theme: repetitions which Akerman uses both as a rich source of comedy and as a device to show erotic desire as a pattern of codes and conventions. Marrying the pleasure of narrative to the purism of the avant-garde, this is her most accessible film to date.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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